Our release yesterday of our Intel 520 SSD Review (Round One) was probably one of the most anticipated events seen yet in the SSD arena and, if sales can be determined by the extreme numbers of readers who visited the site, Intel will do very well.

In that review we made a promise, this being that we would follow up with the absolute best in RAID testing possible, displaying results only we could pull off. Welcome to Round Two folks and get ready for the knockout punch!

With the backdrop of the LSI purchase of SandForce becoming a great story line, Intel’s choice to implement the SandForce SF-2281 into their enthusiast product line has created the ideal that the interaction between the two in creating a custom firmware could have dynamic results. They weren’t wrong as our review of a single Intel 520 blew away the competition in PCMark Vantage Suite Testing.

The Intel 520 simply delivers performance as we have never seen from a SandForce controller, hence the excitement as it is so rare to see such high expectations deliver first hand, and deliver big! If you could, imagine my excitement when Les (our Editor) called and asked me if I could push three Intel 520’s to the limit in order to validate our expectations even further.

I told him we could do one better. Not only are we going to be showing you the performance of RAID 0 tests today, but also, get ready for their use, beside others, in our new Enterprise Test Regimen in upcoming days. For now though, this is for all the enthusiasts out there!

The Intel 520SSD is the culmination of almost a year of Intel’s efforts through intensive validation and firmware customization for the LSI SandForce SF-2281 controller. Each SSD contains Intel’s own ‘hand picked’ 25nm synchronous NAND flash memory, each of these three SSDs being 240GB in capacity. With a 6Gb/s interface providing rated speeds of 550 MB/s read and 520Mb/s write with a maximum 80,000 low 4k random write IOPS for a single drive, three drives will be incredible

ENTER THE HIGHPOINT 2720 SGL RAIDCARD

Timing could not have been better for this report as we were already in the midst of performance testing the HighPoint 2720SGL RAID card with its new firmware and it has shown some amazing results. Quite frankly, the results are off the charts and today’s testing of three Intel 520’s will be a taste of the Highpoint 2720SGL review to follow.

In the end, a quick disconnect of eight 6Gbps SSDs from the 2720SGL saw the connecting of three Intel 520’s. Remember now, this is only a preview with the Intels and a thorough review will be published shortly highlighting the Highpoint, Intels and some unexpected other solid state drives. For now, lets take a quick look at the 2720SGL engine under the hood…

Wow thats alot of benchmarks to be running on the SSDs. I would never do that many within a months time on my SSD.

Paul Alcorn

That is true, many would not. A funny aspect of this is that by the time I had tested this on the HighPoint, I had ran it through two other controllers, putting it through its paces. We used the HighPoint in the end because it gives the clearest view of the drives performance itself, with no caching involved. These drives have taken quite the beating before we even reached review time, and they have much more in front of them in Enterprise testing!

Ghostrecon69

It looks very impresive #s at a highly price cost, when I compare a bit less performance of my Revodrive3 X2 for the half of the cost of all this hardware setup the only thing that I envy out this setup is the 4k #s compare of the Revo3X2. Im still happy with my revo.

paul alcorn

They both certainly have their place. the nice thing about this controller is future expandability. you can upgrade drives as new tech comes out 🙂

Christopher Ryan

That’s some sexy stuff, Paul.

paul alcorn

Thanks Chris! the full review of the new drivers for the highpoint is now up 🙂

Fortune

Paul, will you do a step by step how-to install of the Highpoint 2720sgl on a X79 motherboard? Or is it just plug-n-play w/ update firmware? Meaning just let it boot after updating the firmware then do a soft raid. I have an Asus RIVE, but read some review on an e-tailer it’s not compatible with it, but it seem to work with your ASRock.

paul alcorn

i have no issues with it. If you are having issues though here is some pointers: boot the computer with NO DEVICES connected instal the management software for the card (its called RAID Management) then once installed, flash the BIOS to the “QuickBIOS”. This bios allows the user to not see the control panel that comes up pre-boot. therin usually lies the problem, with incorrect option rom assignments from the motherboards. So, once installed, reboot. you will see no pre-boot GUI, just some test. that should be curative 🙂 it is a ‘low profile’ boot method to get past any incompatibilities with certain mobos. you lose no functionality, all can be manged via the Software in the OS 🙂 lets us know how you fare!

apocalypzez

Hey Paul,

I just bought this raid card and am trying to use 2x intel 520 240GB ssds via this card as a main boot drive. How do I go about doing this?? I have posted this question in the forum as well. And how do you boot to the raid management?? And BIOS version for the card you suggesting. I have installed the latest bios that was available in highpoint website!!

Thx

Mrfsys

The factory enables INT13 by default, so the following sequence is what I would recommend, having previously installed 2 of these 2720SGL cards:

Please review this file for important information about compatibility issues and differences in operation that were discovered after our product manuals were created. In case of conflict among various parts of the documentation set, this file contains the most current information.

The device mapping order in system is same as BIOS setting utility. The disk marked as “BOOT” will always be mapped as first SCSI disk. Please keep it in mind when installing Windows, otherwise OS may be installed to wrong location.

Before installing OS to devices attached to RocketRAID controller, you must remove the drives connected to other controllers from your system temporarily. After OS installation complete, you can put them back.

* Moving disks to other controllers

When you want to use disks previously attached to RocketRAID controller on other controllers, please first delete any array information on the disks. Otherwise your data may be lost when you want to put it back later.

MRFS

First, read the README.TXT file (what a concept, eh?)

INT13 is enabled by default at the factory and, if you are not hosting your OS on that controller, you should DISABLE INT13.

There is a Windows program that makes this easy, BUT you must download both the latest device driver and the Windows program to update the card’s BIOS.

Obviously, you need Windows installed on some other storage device(s), in order to be able to run this BIOS update program.

If you plan to install an OS on this card, you don’t need to change the INT13 setting. Installing Windows is easy: just have the device driver ready on some other medium like an optical disc, USB flash drive etc.

What is the water cooling system you have installed here on the test images? Great review on these hard drives by the way. =)

MySchizoBuddy

newbie question. How did you connect the 3 drives to two ports on the raid card?

Henk

each port on the controller has 4 sata channels. Usually you would connect the two ports to the backplane of your computer case, which in turn has connectors for your disk. Alternatively you can probably pickup a splitter cable on Ebay

Ibmford

Does trim function with RAID in this line? When can we expect TRIM to work in RAID configurations?